New York CNN —
Getty Images announced a lawsuit against Stability AI, the company behind the popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, alleging the tech company copyright infringement.
Image giant accused Stability AI of copying and processing millions of its images without obtaining proper licensing, according to a press release issued on Tuesday. London-based Stability AI announced it had raised $101 million in funding for open-source AI technology in October and released version 2.1 of its Stable Diffusion tool in December.
“Getty Images believes that artificial intelligence has the potential to fuel creative endeavors. Accordingly, Getty Images has provided licenses to leading technology innovators for purposes related to training artificial intelligence systems in a manner that respects personal and intellectual property rights,” Getty wrote in the statement. “Stability AI did not seek such a license from Getty Images and instead chose, in our opinion, to ignore viable licensing options and long-standing legal protections in order to pursue its distinct commercial interests.”
Getty declined to comment further on the lawsuit to CNN, but said it requested a response from the AI firm before taking any action. Stability AI did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
AI art and traditional media providers have struggled to coexist in recent months as computer-generated imagery becomes more available and advanced, and human-made imagery and art is used as data training.
Text-to-image AI systems, once only available to a select group of tech insiders, are becoming increasingly popular and powerful. These systems include OpenAI’s Stable Diffusion and DALL-E.
Shutterstock, a Getty Images competitor and a stock image platform, announced plans in October to expand its partnership with OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E and viral AI chatbot ChatGPT, to improve AI-generated content while maintaining a fund to publish their contributions to compensate artists.
These tools, which usually offer a few free credits before charging, can create all sorts of images with just a few words, including ones that are clearly reminiscent of, if not seemingly created by, the work of many, many artists. Users can access these artists using words like “in the style of” or “of” along with a specific name. Current uses for these tools can range from personal entertainment and hobbies to more commercial cases.
In just a few months, millions of people flocked to text-to-image AI systems, which are already being used to create experimental films, magazine covers, and images to illustrate news. An image generated using an AI system called Midjourney recently won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair, sparking an outcry among artists who fear their art could be stolen by those systems without due credit.
“I don’t want to participate at all in the machinery that’s going to make my work cheaper,” Daniel Danger, an illustrator and printmaker who learned a number of his works were used to train stable diffusion, told CNN in October.
Stability AI Founder and CEO Emad Mostaque emailed CNN Business in October that art is a tiny fraction of the LAION training data behind Stable Diffusion. “Art is much less than 0.1% of the data set and is only created when the user consciously invokes it,” he said.